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4 Ways to Improve Customer Care in Your Call Center

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article |Customer Care|4 Ways to Improve Customer Care in Your Call Center If you’re managing a call center, customer care is the name of the game. You’ll undoubtedly have all kinds of targets to meet, and it’s in your interests to make every call a customer care success. How can you make this a reality? Sometimes, customer care is less about focusing on the caller, and more about investing energy in your staff. Here are four ideas on how to improve customer care in your call center.

Service with a smile

Did you know that a smile can be heard on the phone? Picking up the phone with a smile on your face can make your voice sound warmer and friendlier, and encourage the caller to trust you. This all happens subconsciously, without the customer really being aware! It’s a free, easy way to build a connection instantly. With a smile, you can set up in the right way even the most challenging of calls. Train your staff on this simple trick, and you could see customer satisfaction shoot up!

Celebrate your staff

If you want your staff to smile on the phone, you’ve got to give them plenty of reasons to beam off the phone, too. Working in a call center can be energetic, fast-paced, and fun. But it can also be draining and repetitive. Not to mention the exhaustion of dealing with angry customers. Keep spirits high by celebrating your staff regularly. This is how BPOs in the Philippines motivate their employees. They recognize employees achievements monthly, quarterly, and annually, and provide perks that they can enjoy. Your celebration could be as simple as some targeted praise after a perfect call that you overhear. Or you could create a reward system, perhaps where coworkers nominate each other, or based off a leaderboard related to departmental targets.

Create a positive environment

So much of excellent customer service comes down to brilliant representatives. But even if you hire the very best representatives available, if the environment is poor, they will either leave or become disengaged. The culture of the call center should be all about support and positivity. Then these elements will feed into the service provided. Remember, the culture is often dictated by what happens at the top. Think about how senior staff communicate and how they handle challenges. The team will look to them to set the tone for the entire department, so it’s vital they set a shining example. Positivity is everything.

Get the right tools

Making use of the latest tools like Knowledge base software could really boost your call center and make customer service a breeze. Artificial intelligence applications can make life easier for representatives as well as customers. You should also invest in analytics tools which will enable you to track and record statistics relating to calls and customer experience. This can be useful for training, appraisals, and rewards.

It might be possible for some of the processes within the department to be automated completely. For example, you can use RPA tools for real-time automation. This can improve productivity and allow for proactive staff training. Saving time and boosting productivity means benefits for you and your customers. You could even take the bold move of asking your staff what tools might help them better do their job.

Conclusion

Getting call center operations right can be extremely challenging. If you wish to outsource call center services as a business, read this comparison guide first.

Key Steps to Improving Your Business Customer Service

If you want to improve the success of your business, then first and foremost, you need to think of your customers. They are the ones that are going to make the difference between the business being a success or not. Because without any customers, there is no business. So what are the things that you can be doing to improve the relationships that you have with your customers? The answer is an obvious one, but it is often overlooked: improve customer service. No matter how great your team are, how good your business idea is and what you do or sell is, one of the things that customers are likely to remember is what the interaction with your business is like; both negative or positive, it will be remembered.

A strong company will want to have, and hopefully, already strive to have, great customer relationships. But a smart company will be looking for ways to improve and really getting down to the bottom of what good customer service is. It is all about listening carefully to your customers’ needs and wants. You need to make sure that you’re able to keep up, otherwise, they are likely to take their business elsewhere. So here are some ideas to help.

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article | Key Steps to Improving Your Business Customer Service
 
Strengthen Your Customer Service Skills

First, it is a good idea to make sure that your customer service team, if you have one, has the right skills for your managing the needs of your customers. They are what customers will have first contact with, so it needs to be a good experience, even if the outcome isn’t necessarily positive. customers’ needs. No amount of software or things like CRM can compensate for any shortcomings with your team’s customer service.

Improve Customer Service Strategy

You and your team may have the skills to provide some good customer service, and have no problems with customers interactions. But what strategies can you start to implement to please your customers even more? You don’t want customers to come to you with problems, if they can be dealt with ahead of time.

Getting personal with customers can be a good idea, as it can allow you to have another level of interaction, through sites like Twitter or Facebook. You can also look to improve how you do certain things, such as your logistics or supply chain. If you are noticing that there are things going wrong, then look to do something about them, such as looking into semi truck leasing or other ways to improve deliveries, before big issues come up and people then demand more from you. If you deal with things before they’re an issue, then it really does provide a good customer service experience.

All Customers to Provide Feedback

No matter how proactive you are in the things that you do, there will always be one issue or another that you never manage to get on top of. So to make sure that you learn about all sides of the experience that your customers have with your business, then it can help you to create a simple way for them to provide you with feedback.

You Know What A Customer Might Want, But Not Exactly

Your business should never assume to know what your customers always want. Funnelling them into a list of options that can either get the product and or service right or as close to right, is the best way to go about things. You offer customers something that is in the ballpark of what they’re looking for but you allow themselves to narrow it down further. For example, if you are an automobile company, you have set organized products. A customer might be looking for a saloon, which you have. However they want to choose what kind of engine it will have, the paint scheme, the interior, the technology and the additional accessories like a roof rack option. However, you don’t possibly know what exactly the customer wants. You can only give them options. When there are a lot of variables floating around, pricing everything they have chosen accurately takes a specific kind of process. This can be solved by a software solution but first you need to provide those options.

In the professional promotions

Think about what is a very specific order from another business? It’s always going to be their promotional gear. They want a certain color scheme, a certain style of clothing, perhaps specific designs, materials, logo placement, sizes and more. That’s why a CQB apparel configurator is something that you need to provide for businesses that want to quickly see how much their unique demands will cost. You firstly configure your products to present them the best foundations, and then after their changes and unique optional choices, you can price what the total might amount to. If they are wanting a large order and then also want their order shipped to a specific location, you can provide them with a quote for the entire purchase from start to finish. When you can provide this, businesses are more likely to be more assured that they can either afford your products or would like to change them.

The retail options

The clothing industry is looking to improve their sizing and generalized approach to their online shopping experiences. For one thing, now almost every retail clothing company has a size guide. They now provide customers with a much more accurate option to choose what kind of length and width product they want. If you are a retail clothing company then you might want to go one step further than this and provide the options of specific features. For example, the torso of a product might be 36 inches across the chest but the arms don’t have a measurement. You can provide this measurement so that the customer can make a more informed choice of what kind of size they would prefer. This is especially desired by women who want to have short tops but longer sleeves for particular street fashion outfits such as crop tops.

The more options you can provide your customers, the more likely they are to positively engage with your business. They might be teetering on the edge but thanks to your CQP software, they can accurately see what their customized product will look like and how much they will pay for it.

Meeting the Needs of the Modern Consumer

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Articles |Customer Service| Meeting the Needs of the Modern ConsumerIt’s 2019, and the power consumers have in today’s marketplace continues to be unparalleled.

In particular, today’s savvy consumers have access to and can communicate with companies around the world at virtually any time of day, allowing them to not only compare the value of products and services, but also determine whether they share the same core brand values.

Indeed, it doesn’t matter if you represent a big corporation or are a solopreneur — your customers are calling the shots. In many ways, your customers expect to be able to engage with you on their terms and on their preferred channels.

Here’s a look at ways many of today’s successful companies are meeting the needs of the modern consumer.

Multi-channel Service

These days, communicating with companies of all sizes is easier than ever. But with a multitude of options with which consumers can communicate with your brand — from phone and email to SMS and social media — you’ll need to employ a strategy that covers these bases and more to be successful.

According to Shopify, more than 85 percent of today’s consumers use at least two communication channels when interacting with companies, albeit to shop or raise a customer service issue. This is true whether they research online and buy in-store or vice versa.

With this in mind, ideally, you will need to ensure your company has — and maintains — a presence on the digital channels most popular with your customers and prospects. The exact combination could be very different depending on your industry.

Ultimately, your best bet is to ask your customers, typically via email or an online survey, the contact methods they prefer and see which channels your competitors use as well.

Social Media Monitoring

When it comes to social media, meeting the needs of the modern consumer becomes more complicated. Your customers expect you to be listening at virtually all hours of the day and respond in kind in a timely manner. That means you can’t create social media pages, monitor the inboxes for those channels and call it a day.

While some of your customers will use those channels to contact you directly, many more are posting about your company, its products and its people on various social media sites. Some of these will include the ones on which you may already have a presence, like Facebook, but there will be others that you might not use, like WhatsApp or Yelp.

With this in mind, it’s a good idea to have a program in place to help monitor mentions of your company and its offerings so you can respond as quickly as possible, to both positive and negative comments.

Calls are Not Going Away

While it’s important to offer a variety of online communications channels for customers and prospects to reach you, you should also realize traditional phone-based customer service isn’t going away anytime soon.
That’s because multi-channel communications typically do not replace the need to speak to a live person. Instead, they enable previously dormant or silent followers to ask questions and otherwise engage with your company.
Phone support is one of the top ways that companies representing all industries provide support. It is efficient, empathetic and responsive.

Personalization

Not all phone support is created equal, though. According to Entrepreneur, roughly 80 percent of consumers say the customer service agents with whom they interact are unaware of any past communication with the brand. The other 20 percent are doing something right.

Some companies have contact center agents standing by who look up information as the caller speaks. Other services, such a cloud call center, take it a step further by integrating a slew of self-service options to direct the call to the right department. The idea is to provide context to the current conversation — and, perhaps more importantly, any future ones — wherever possible.

When these efforts are integrated into a robust customer relationship management solution, it becomes easier for agents to determine whether specific customers have had previous interactions with your brand.

More to the point, keeping a record of what transpired on the previous customer service interaction means customers don’t have to repeat the same information — and become frustrated — over and over again. Customer service then improves, which can bolster consumer loyalty, creating a win-win for both parties.

Letting Customers’ Voices be Heard, Loud and Clear

Today’s modern, savvy consumers expect to have multiple channels to communicate and do business with their favorite brands. They also want their voices heard — and to be amplified when necessary — on social media if their brand experience is anything less than stellar. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t turn to and rely on phone-based customer service.

Oh, but the times are a-changin’ — and it’s up to forward-thinking brands to continually come up with new ways to allow customers to be comfortable and in the driver’s seat when making important buying decisions so these customers become repeat customers.

3 Huge Customer Service Mistakes You Could Be Making

The majority of customers prioritize good service when they’re choosing a company to deal with and they certainly won’t become repeat customers if they don’t feel that your customer service is up to scratch. That’s why it’s vital that you know how to make the customer experience perfect every single time. There are a lot of things that you should be doing, but it’s equally as important to understand the things that you shouldn’t be doing. These are the biggest customer service mistakes that you could be making right now.

StrategyDriven Customer Relationship Management Article
 
Not Taking Advantage Of Technology

Technology is a great asset for businesses and you’re really letting yourself down if you’re not taking advantage of it. Good technology can massively improve your customer service department if you know how to use it properly. One of the major benefits of technology in customer service is that you can make yourself available 24/7 on a wide range of channels. Head over to www.bpmonline.com for more information on implementing customer service help desk software. You can set up a live chat service which is more convenient for customers and also easier for your staff to manage. It’ll also help to improve your phone systems and give you email alerts when customers are trying to get in touch. Good customer service software will help you to respond to queries a lot quicker and offer better resolutions that keep everybody happy.

Ignoring Negative Comments

People base a lot of their purchasing decisions on reviews these days. Most businesses have an online review service and that’s the first thing customers are going to look at. Hopefully, you won’t have too many negative comments on there but every company is going to get a few. That’s not a problem as long as you deal with them properly. Some companies think that the best thing to do is ignore them, but it isn’t. If you ignore those comments, other potential customers will assume that’s your response to customer complaints. What you should be doing instead is coming up with good resolutions and then posting a reply, apologising for the problem and outlining how you’re going to deal with it. Customers don’t expect your company to be absolutely perfect but they do expect you to deal with any problems in a timely manner. Visit www.fundera.com for more tips on dealing with a negative comment.

Excessive Company Policy

Company policy is important and it’s there for a reason. It helps you to maintain a level of consistency across the board but sometimes, it can be a big problem. If you’ve got too many different policies that aren’t logical, and you’re not willing to bend the rules a bit, customers are going to get annoyed. You should let your employees use a bit of initiative and go outside company policy in certain situations where it makes sense and it helps them come up with a resolution for the customer. Don’t let company policy get in the way of good customer service.

These 3 mistakes could cost you dearly if they ruin your customer service and send your valuable customers elsewhere.